Use this search box to find articles that have run in our newspapers over the last several years.
Date: 1/30/2019
WEST SPRINGFIELD – Last week, Reminder Publishing ran a story highlighting the first three objectives of the West Springfield Public Schools (WSPS) District Improvement Plan in an effort break down the document for residents and parents. This week’s Part 2 of the series will take a closer look at the remaining objectives.
According to state law, school districts are required to create a District Improvement Plan (DIP) every three years outlining their aspirations to improve the performance of the district and its schools.
From 2018 to 2021, WSPS plans on honing in on a variety of key components, including topics like English learners, special education, social-emotional learning, modes of communication with families and alternative pathways to graduation – there are six strategic objectives in total.
The district will fund these initiatives through the regular budget, and the plan is still in its early stages of development.
The first three objectives touch on areas of student support services relating to English Learners, special education and social-emotional learning.
The following is a summarized version of each of the final three objectives.
Objective 4: The District will implement programs to provide alternative pathways for students to complete diploma requirements.
The district recently refurbished a building on campus to carry out two separate programs offering “alternative” routes to graduation, according to WSPS Director of English Language Learners Sharlene DeSteph.
The first program is called Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education (SLIFE) and seeks to serve older English learners who have had gaps in their education.
“Essentially, they’re older students who have come into the country as refugees with limited or interrupted education – and by that, I mean they have a number of years of missing schooling,” said DeSteph. “Some might be high school-aged – 15 to 19 – but perhaps the last time they attended school was in the first grade.”
She explained the program’s mission is to create an educational program that “fits them [the students] and is appropriate” in helping the students catch up on their education.
English learner students ranging up to 22-years-old are eligible for the program.
“There’s this group of students who are expected to follow a really traditional style of education and to obtain a diploma in four years – it may be impossible due to the fact they don’t have enough education or because they’ll age out of school before they can even complete their requirements,” DeSteph continued.
Younger SLIFE students may have the opportunity to transition to the high school and earn a traditional diploma if their skills develop in time.
Students who age out of the program, on the other hand, may continue to develop their workforce skills through internships set up via the program or seek other services through schools like Holyoke Community College.
“What we want to do is prepare them to be contributing community members. We want to connect them with the workforce here in town and get them geared up to be really proficient in the language of a job they’re most interested in,” said DeSteph. “We would find a way to continue to service them – there’s no closing the door on them.”
The other program offered is the Adult Education program, which caters to students who have been reengaged to the system or who are at-risk of dropping out.
Although Adult Education students won’t graduate with a traditional high school diploma, they can graduate with a West Springfield High School Adult Education Diploma – extending further opportunities at Springfield Technical Community College, HCC and the military.
“We’ve got students who have special needs in terms of their experiences, backgrounds and trauma,” said WSPS Superintendent Michael Richard. “The number of nontraditional students is as great as the number of traditional learners, so we’ve got to set up programs where we can service those students to make them successful – not just while they’re in our schools, but certainly for the balance of their lives.”
Objective 5: The district will develop and articulate a special education model that includes a comprehensive breadth of services through alignment of special programs.
Part of WSPS Administrator of Special Services Kathryn Mahony’s responsibilities as a new director is to analyze and assess the programs that serve the district’s special education students – there are currently around 860 – that learn in “substantially separate classrooms.”
The DIP’s fifth objective seeks to accomplish this.
“What we want do is take a look – and we’ve been doing this, and we continue to do this – at the services and make sure there’s continuity as they [the students] move through the different grade levels and from school to school,” said Mahony. “We have a variety of programs across the district, starting from Pre-Kindergarten going all the way up to age 22, and some of those programs are focused on Applied Behavior Analysis, some of our programs are for students with multiple disabilities and some of our programs are for students with social emotional behavioral needs.”
The district is looking at how students are found eligible for these programs and how their Individual Education Plans (IEPs) are written.
The IEPs outline a student’s area of disability, while listing a set of goals – every student receiving special education has an IEP, the administrator explained.
“All of our teachers and our evaluation team leaders are working to write clear, directed IEPs for our students – you can never stop working on improving the quality of those documents,” Mahony commented. “That’s something we’ve been working through and we’ve seen great improvement.”
The district is also taking a closer look at the curriculum for some of these specialized programs, assessing which new programs can be added and where.
The district recently implemented a program for several of its classrooms that cater to students with autism, and is looking to add another program, called Unique System, that targets students with more significant disabilities.
“We want to make sure that, just because a student is in a substantially separate classroom, it doesn’t mean they don’t get the rigor and research-based curriculum that everybody else works from,” said Mahony.
Objective 6: The District will expand modes of communication and outreach to families and community partners in order to enhance student success.
The final objective of the WSPS District Improvement Plan focuses on connecting with district parents.
So far, the district has implemented an English Learner Parent Advisory Council, a Special Education Parent Advisory Council and a District Parent Community Outreach team – which meets every few weeks.
“These all kind of tie together – they’re all different feedback mechanisms,” said WSPS Business Analyst and Grants Manager Kim Hunter. “We’re figuring out ways to increase parent engagement across the board.”
A mobile app is also in the works, added Hunter, while “behind-the-scenes” efforts are being done to increase the district’s ability to reach parents – such as improved ways to gather contact information, allowing the district to reach out digitally.
Electronic enrollment for the kindergarten class will begin in April in an effort to simplify and quicken the process.
“Because we’re going electronic, we want to figure out how to take away the stuff that was annoying to parents beforehand, and increase their ability to build relationships,” said Hunter. “We’ll take all of the overhead stuff and the redundancies, and get rid of all that – but build relationships at the same time. That [electronic enrollment] should allow us to free up some time.”
All in all, Hunter told Reminder Publishing the district wants to make the DIP more easily accessible for parents and residents.
For future updates on the progress of the District Improvement Plan, the school committee provides briefings during its meetings – which take place on the second and fourth Tuesday of every month at the Municipal Office Building Auditorium.
The meetings are live-streamed on Facebook via the Town of West Springfield Facebook page and are aired on Channel 15 at 7 p.m.